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From the Publisher

Image of Chocolate Muscovado Banana Cake. Reads “The Essential Nigel Slater with Over 200 Recipes”

Creamy Green Lentil Soup

Sourdough Loaf

Baked Pumpkin, Burrata, and Lentils

Roasted Chicken with Roasted Potatoes and Roasting Juices

Black Currant Focaccia

Spiced Plum Crumble

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Though perfectly explicit, Slater’s recipes read like prose, which means that you’ll want to curl up in your favorite chair and read through each one slowly until you just can’t take it any longer and have to get up to make your own za’atar-spiked chicken cutlets or a bowl of orecchiette tossed with basil and zucchini.”—Eater

“His work proves that simple cooking with good ingredients will often result in a sumptuous meal if approached thoughtfully, and in A Cook’s Book, you’ll find plenty of relaxed, intentionally crafted meals to return to over and over again.”—Bon Appetit

“With A Cook’s Book, Slater’s 16th, he solidifies his status as a home-cook icon. The recipes are simple and confident, the ingredient lists radical in their hewing to what’s on hand in today’s pantry . . .”—AirMail

About the Author

Nigel Slater is the author of a collection of bestselling books, including the classics Real Fast Food, Appetite, and the critically acclaimed The Kitchen Diaries. He has written a much-loved column for The Observer (London) for eighteen years and is the presenter of the award-winning BBC series Simple Suppers. His memoir, Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger, has won six major awards, including British Biography of the Year, and has been adapted into a BBC film.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

I am a cook who writes. You could measure my life in recipes. Each one a letter to a friend, a story of something I have made for dinner, the tale of how it came to be on my table. A salad tossed together with fava beans, salted ricotta, and the first white-tipped radishes of spring; a roasted chicken, its crisp skin served with a fat jug of its roasting juices on an autumn day; or a gloriously messy platter of grilled eggplant, hummus, and torn flatbread shared with the best of friends.

That letter might accurately chronicle the details of a cake with which I am quietly pleased, tell the reader of a quince that has simmered peacefully in lemon juice and orange blossom honey on my stove on a winter’s afternoon or mention a pillowy dumpling I have just lifted from a steaming bamboo basket. Sharing food with those at your table—passing around a bowl of late autumn raspberries or a slice of sugar-encrusted blackberry and apple pie—is heart-warming enough, but a recipe posted in a newspaper, ephemerally on social media, or in more lasting form in the pages of a book, has widely. It is just a recipe, a suggestion for something you might like to make for others, but it is what I do.

The first recipe I encountered—for a Christmas cake—belonged to my mother. Handwritten on a piece of ruled Basildon Bond notepaper, it lived in the bowl of the electric mixer that only saw light of day once a year, when I helped her make The Cake. The first cooking I did on my own was a baking sheet of jam tarts—black currant, marmalade, and raspberry. The ghost of them lingers still, me standing on a stool in an attempt to reach the kitchen table, rolling out scraps of pastry into a craggy rectangle with a red-handled wooden rolling pin, pressing Mum’s crinkle-edged cutters into the pale dough and filling the little tarts with jam as bright and clear as jewels. The jam boiled over and glued the tarts to the pan, but peeling off the chewy crumbs and eating them was a delight.

There is something—and this is the point really—that goes hand in hand with making something to eat, that transcends putting the finished dish on the table. Cooking for me at least—is about making yourself something to eat and sharing food with others but is also—whisper it—about the quiet moments of joy to be had along the way. Watching the progress of dinner as you stir onions in a pan, at first crisp, white, and pungent—you may have shed a tear—then slowly becoming translucent gold, darkening to bronze, all the time becoming softer, sweeter. Take them too far though, and those sweet onions will turn bitter. And that is where a good recipe comes in and partly the point of what I do, to guide a new cook toward a pleasing dinner, and for those who have been cooking for years, to share a recipe that they may not know.

I am not a chef and never have been. The word means “chief” and is therefore somewhat inappropriate. It is no secret that I ran away from the heat of the professional kitchen. The stress and frenetic speed of the work, the dedication required to be really good at what you do, and the relentlessness of that life simply wasn’t for me. I wanted to cook for a living but without the seasoning of stress and adrenaline. I fell into writing about food by accident—while working in a rather lovely café—so it is odd to think I have had a food column for nigh on thirty years, written ten cookbooks and penned a memoir (that itself spawned a film and stage play). My respect for professional chefs not only remains undimmed, but I find myself in awe of what they do. It just wasn’t my thing.

How I cook

I am a home cook. I have cooked for half a century and still love every slow turn of the wooden spoon. Simple food, nothing fancy. Just something to eat really. Yes, I go out to dinner or bring home a tray of sushi; I will phone for gyoza or biang biang noodles but even then I will probably have cooked lunch at home. I once described my cooking as “straightforward, everyday stuff, the sort of thing you might like to come home to after a busy day.” I still stand by that.

Making a few ingredients into something good to eat continues to give immeasurable pleasure. Making dinner for others even more so. I love the deep reassurance that comes from cooking and eating something familiar, a dish I know well, but I also possess an endless curiosity with the new—an insatiable hunger for what is to come. I am never going to be someone who repeats the same old dishes year in year out as if on some sort of culinary treadmill. There is far too much fun to be had for that.

As cook and writer I have got things right, wrong, and somewhere in between. I know my faults—in particular my ability to be contradictory, by turns pedantic (handmade basil pesto is better than that made in a food processor, fava beans are much nicer to eat if you take the time to pop them out of their papery skins), and can at other times be happily laid-back (it truly doesn’t matter if the fruit sinks to the bottom of your cake; it is just as delicious). We are what we are.

I enjoy eating complex, exquisitely presented food. I just don’t like cooking it. More truthfully, I can’t. I leave such delicate artistry to the professionals.

So, back to simple

Dinner is rarely more than a single dish in this house. A bowl of noodles with chile and greens; plump, garlicky beans slowly cooked in the oven, a boned chicken leg on the grill brushed with thyme and lemon. Sometimes we feast: a vast dish of pasta with mussels and shrimp; a steaming pie of sweet potatoes and lentils; baked fatty pork with butter beans and broth. Even then, this is straightforward eating. The nearest you will get to a starter is a bowl of olives. Dessert or cake is more often a midmorning thing. Tiramisu, after all, means “pick-me-up”—a neat, sweet punch of energy for when we start to flag. Come to dinner and you are just as likely to get your food in a bowl as on a plate. And those bowls won’t match either.

But casual does not mean careless. There is much pleasure to be had from doing a little thing meticulously—taking your time to perform a kitchen task that could be done more quickly. There is a lot of satisfaction in slowly, carefully unfurling and washing salad leaves. Drying them too. If I am enjoying a specific kitchen task—making a salad dressing, shaping a loaf, or grating a lemon—I will often slow down, taking a minute or two more to enjoy the process. It is why my mortar and pestle gets as much use as my food processor. Both have a place in the kitchen, but one is about getting something done, the other about enjoying doing it.

It is true that I like to keep things minimal. I often look at a recipe and consider what I can take out rather than what else I can put in. Following a recipe with nineteen ingredients is rather like walking into a room where every surface is awash with ornaments.

I have no patience with perfection. I would rather have a good time around a table with friends and some rough-edged cooking than marvel in silence at the cook’s technical precision. I have been to too many dinners like that and they are painful—it is almost a relief to go home. To put it another way, let’s just make something good for dinner and enjoy ourselves.

My cooking is free, without being constrained by the rather tiresome idea of doing something as it has always been done, or worse—how someone else feels it should be done. Unfettered by the chains of classical cooking or misplaced authenticity, I am free to enjoy myself in the kitchen.

I couldn’t care a jot what is, or is not, considered fashionable. I only care whether or not it is delicious. When some keyboard warrior—or heaven forbid “influencer”—decides that “sourdough is so yesterday, gochujang is a passing fad,” I just find myself laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. Something is either good to eat, or it isn’t.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ten Speed Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 7, 2023
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1984861697
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1984861696
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.96 x 1.8 x 9.73 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #545,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #498 in Gastronomy Essays (Books)
- #502 in Culinary Biographies & Memoirs
- #1,396 in Celebrity & TV Show Cookbooks
Customer Reviews:
(46)

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Nigel Slater

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Nigel Slater is the author of a collection of best-selling books and presenter of BBC 1's Eating Together, Simple Cooking and Dish of the Day. He has been food columnist for The Observer for over twenty years. His books include the classics Appetite and The Kitchen Diaries and the critically acclaimed two volume Tender. His award-winning memoir Toast – the Story of a Boy's Hunger won six major awards and is now a BBC film starring Helena Bonham Carter and Freddie Highmore. His writing has won the National Book Awards, the Glenfiddich Trophy, the André Simon Memorial Prize and the British Biography of the Year. He was the winner of a Guild of Food Writers' Award for his BBC 1 series Simple Suppers.

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Sally L
Great gift
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

I gave this as a gift and they absolutely love it so much!

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kf
Yes
Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Great book

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crazy4cookbooks
As enjoyable to read, as to cook from!
Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2023
Format: Hardcover
I’m almost embarrassed to admit I had never heard of Nigel Slater prior to this book! But his self-description of being a cook who writes, and a writer who cooks had me interested from the first line. The fact that he is a home cook, versus a “chef” was an added bonus. I related to his commitment to constantly rework and improve tried and true methods and therefore decided to dive into the volume’s 500 pages. The book was as enjoyable to read, as it was to cook from! The directions were clear; the recipes themselves were quite a comprehensive collection (10 pages alone devoted to roasting a chicken!), and perhaps most important - the prose actually inspired me to cook! The book is actually quite a love story to preparing a meal at home, and the recipes I tried were quite delicious. I would never have considered mustard to be an ingredient in a pasta dish, but it worked well in the recipe on page 257. And not even presented as a formal recipe, is a gem of an asian leaning chicken thigh recipe included in a narrative on page 197. The brownies, the focaccia, both excellent. The list of recipes I still want to try is long. Ten Speed Press provided me with a free copy of this book, however the opinions and experiences I have had cooking from this book are my own. I really enjoyed this book. It makes you want to get in your kitchen and cook! Not much more you can say for a cookbook than that!

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crazy4cookbooks

As enjoyable to read, as to cook from!

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2023
I’m almost embarrassed to admit I had never heard of Nigel Slater prior to this book! But his self-description of being a cook who writes, and a writer who cooks had me interested from the first line. The fact that he is a home cook, versus a “chef” was an added bonus. I related to his commitment to constantly rework and improve tried and true methods and therefore decided to dive into the volume’s 500 pages. The book was as enjoyable to read, as it was to cook from! The directions were clear; the recipes themselves were quite a comprehensive collection (10 pages alone devoted to roasting a chicken!), and perhaps most important - the prose actually inspired me to cook! The book is actually quite a love story to preparing a meal at home, and the recipes I tried were quite delicious. I would never have considered mustard to be an ingredient in a pasta dish, but it worked well in the recipe on page 257. And not even presented as a formal recipe, is a gem of an asian leaning chicken thigh recipe included in a narrative on page 197. The brownies, the focaccia, both excellent. The list of recipes I still want to try is long. Ten Speed Press provided me with a free copy of this book, however the opinions and experiences I have had cooking from this book are my own. I really enjoyed this book. It makes you want to get in your kitchen and cook! Not much more you can say for a cookbook than that!

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Lori
Excellent!
Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2024
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
I love reading cookbooks like a novel- and this one is a great read! The recipes are almost secondary!(gasp! Don’t tell Nigel!) I have only cooked a couple recipes so far and they were great! Clear directions, not too many crazy ingredients- this might be the one I cook from 1st to last page!

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8 people found this helpful

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Nancy Brown
Beautiful dishes!
Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2023
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Recipes are east to follow and produce healthful and attractive dishes.

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K. Quezada
A whole lot of fun!
Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2023
Format: Kindle
I received an early copy of this cookbook to test recipes and review it and boy was I blown away!
Right off the bat i noticed the organization of the recipes and quality of the book pages. Both are very nice. The recipes are organized in a sensible that’s easy to digest(pun fully intended).
There’s a very wide variety of dishes for anyones palette. Vegetables, meats, fruits it’s all represented.
The stories that accompanied the recipes were engaging without being cloying and overly sentimental.
The recipes themselves were solid. Nothing I tried was a stand out but My family liked everything I made.
The recipes were easy to follow. Easy to source ingredients for. Overall well written.
This would be a solid addition to a regular homecook’s cookbook shelf. The only negatives I can really find we’re not every recipe had a corresponding picture and as the book Is quite thick and traditionally bound it was hard to cook from without a weight to keep it open. It was way too thick to fit into my cookbook stand.
But these were just small downsides to an overall good cooking experience. Solid A- book for the confident home cook.

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ALS
Good reading plus good eating!
Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2023
Format: Hardcover
A Cook’s Book is my favorite Nigel Slater book so far. As someone who loves to read cookbooks as much as to cook from them, Slater never fails to bring good reading and good eating plus beautiful images to his cookbooks. There is something calming and meditative in reading Slater’s writing that makes you feel you have someone helping you along as you prepare each dish.

I’ve been working my way from the soups (double the recipes!) to the desserts and everything I’ve tried is classic Slater- not too difficult to make and using tried and true ingredients plus a few you’re not too familiar with just to keep things interesting. This is comfort food that’s also elegant enough to serve for company. I particularly like that there are so many vegetarian choices.

It’s also wonderful to see Slater’s personal ceramic collection again in this lovely cookbook.

I know I will be cooking from this book for a long time!

Please note, Ten Speed Press provided me with a free copy of this book; the opinions are my own.

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Michael McDonald
Big book!
Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2023
Format: Hardcover
Ten speed press provided me with a free copy of this book,the opinions are my own. This is a beautiful cookbook to read and cook from. The chicken breasts with mustard and Marsala was the first recipe I made. Had all the ingredients in my kitchen, and was easy and delicious. I did find I had to cook the chicken longer than recipe called for. I usually bake chicken breasts not cook them on stove top. Carrots and orzo on page 94 was another great recipe with ingredients that are readily available. I’ve never cooked carrots with orzo. Great combination. I made the pasta with sausage, basil, and mustard for lunch. It came together in 1/2 an hour. That included boiling water. This will be a regular in my recipe collection. Very tasty, easy & delicious. This is a 500 page book, looking forward to more cooking.

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Amazon Customer
Nigel Slater sempre vale a pena!
Reviewed in Brazil on April 25, 2025
Format: KindleVerified Purchase

Adoro os livros desse autor, tenho outros também. Sempre ótimas receitas, simples de preparar, e uma narrativa que vale a pena por si só.

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Creamy Green Lentil Soup

Sourdough Loaf

Baked Pumpkin, Burrata, and Lentils

Roasted Chicken with Roasted Potatoes and Roasting Juices

Black Currant Focaccia

Spiced Plum Crumble

Editorial Reviews

Review

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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Nigel Slater

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As enjoyable to read, as to cook from!

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As enjoyable to read, as to cook from!

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5.0 out of 5 stars Nigel Slater sempre vale a pena!

Nigel Slater sempre vale a pena!